Jane's Writing Shed.

After the rain Between the dark wood and caravan park, behind the beach at Yellowcraig, a field of corn was cut for another year, leaving pale gold stubble rows, ripe for raiding rooks and crows. As a hare sidled onto the far side  of the field it  kept nibbling as birds  dropped  down  around it. Then rain stomped down in furrows and I lost sight of the hare until looking up after the storm,  there  it was, paws outstretched, a cloud-hare sparring with  a cloud-crow  as stratus torn and holed was shot through with partial rainbows.

We've been visiting the Hundy Mundy Natural Woodland Burial Site near Kelso for several years since a dear young relative was buried there. This poem is for Albert. Hundy Mundy Burial Site Once here the dead become cocooned  inside  the earth. They shelter in grassed- over kists  within high stands of beech,  pine  and oak.  There are no tidy rows  and each lies  entirely  alone  on their own  meridian.  Their eulogies are written  in softening inscriptions  on flat-bedded  stones with wildflowers  and pine cones.  And in the last clearing  on the hill surrounded   by the Lammermuirs,  Eildons  and Cheviots,  there's a gothic folly named  for a Pictish Princess,  Hunimundias. I like to think the crows and rooks help to oversee this place which always welcomes, always waits.

Watching On a day when the News is full of horror and fear is more diffuse than ever,  I notice  the old jetty posts rotting in the mud  at Tyninghame  estuary  and abandoned World War Two concrete blocks at the edge of the wood.  Countless dead crustaceans  caught  in nets of grass are  scooped up in the strand-line  among the marran  and cockle sand. A dozen herons  are studying  the saltmarsh pools as an egret drifts away flying further round the spit. Dunlin feed on the  edge  of the incoming tide and like insects fly  as one when disturbed.  Then as the cries of curlew,  tern and geese wash through, I realise  I've lost sight  of what's happening beyond here, for now.